n' like a dummy's
that id be trying to spake--and she grew very frightened, and says she,
'I ask your honour's pardon, Sir, but I can't hear you right,' and with
that he stretches up his neck nigh out of his cravat, turning his face
up towards the ceiling, and--grace between us and harm!--his throat was
cut across, and wide open; she seen no more, but dropped in a dead faint
in the bed, and back to her mother with her in the morning, and she
never swallied bit or sup more, only she just sat by the fire holding
her mother's hand, crying and trembling, and peepin' over her shoulder,
and starting with every sound, till she took the fever and died, poor
thing, not five weeks after.'

And so on, and on, and on flowed the stream of old Sally's narrative,
while Lilias dropped into dreamless sleep, and then the story-teller
stole away to her own tidy bed-room and innocent slumbers.

CHAPTER XII.

SOME ODD FACTS ABOUT THE TILED HOUSE--BEING AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF
THE GHOST OF A HAND.

I'm sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was
veracious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly
is--marvels, fabulae, what our ancestors called winter's tales--which
gathered details from every narrator, and dilated in the act of
narration. Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to
be haunted. Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of
truth--an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my
readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can't.

Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753,
gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House,
which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such
fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of interest, and relates
it certainly with an awful sort of particularity.

I was for printing the entire letter, which is really very singular as
well as characteristic. But my publisher meets me with his _veto_; and I
believe he is right. The worthy old lady's letter _is_, perhaps, too
long; and I must rest content with a few hungry notes of its tenor.

That year, and somewhere about the 24th October, there broke out a
strange dispute between Mr. Alderman Harper, of High Street, Dublin, and
my Lord Castlemallard, who, in virtue of his cousinship to the young
heir's mother, had undertaken for him the management of the tiny estate
on w